Raja Ravi Varma was an Indian painter, born in 1848 at Kilimanoor Palace in Travancore, a princely state in the far south of India that is now part of Kerala. He died in 1906.
He painted the Hindu gods and the heroes of India's two great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, in European oil paint, with the weight and shadow of real bodies. Then he had them printed by the thousands.
When most Indians picture Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune, or Saraswati, the goddess of learning, they still picture his versions.
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The prints came from a press near Bombay that he opened in 1894 with his younger brother. For the price of a cheap color print, a family without a palace could pin a goddess to its wall.
The press carried his images across India. But it lost money from the start, and it did not stay in the family.
Critics were slower than buyers. In 1914 a famous critic called his work vulgar, and for decades his prints were dismissed as calendar pictures.
Yet the man behind them had started with almost no training. He learned oil painting largely by watching a European portraitist who did not want to teach him.
A boy who drew on palace walls
Ravi Varma was born on April 29, 1848, at Kilimanoor Palace…
What You'll Discover
Who taught him oil painting.
What won him the Governor's medal.
Whose faces he gave the goddesses.
Who ended up owning his press.
Who called his gods vulgar.